DDoSing WoW Gets You Federal Prison Time

This firmly lands in the category of "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." This jackass was using DDoS attacks to disrupt the gameplay of his own clanmates because he was not happy with the distribution of loot after raiding.

A Romanian computer hacker who orchestrated a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the European servers of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft was sentenced today to one year in federal prison.

When I was a part of running the #1 Red Orchestra 2 server on the internet, we had to ban some misbehaving players being obnoxious and ruining the game for everyone else.

Shortly after we started getting DDOS:ed, which, even after upgrading to an expensive protection package with a different and better hosting company was not enough to counter it. One by one the regulars got frustrated with frequently not being able to play, and moved on to other servers, killing the community.

I would love to see every piece of shit script kiddie starting a DDOS serve some time in federal "pound me up the ass" prison.

And this is why games need their own loot like in Guild Wars 2, Torchlight 2, or Warframe

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Or people could just you know, grow up and not be selfish retards who throw tantrums causing problems for others just because they didn't get their way. As GoldenTiger said, it's a matter of learning how to integrate into basic society.

This is the equivalent of going to a store to buy a shirt, seeing someone else walk out with the last one, and then attempting to burn the place down because you didn't get what you wanted. Seriously, apply every instance of some screeching idiot who pulls this kind of crap online to a real world scenario and it's instantly ridiculous.

Hell, let's even apply this to a real world situation involving games. Little idiot goes to a local themepark, plays a carnival game and loses then proceeds to go out of his way to mess up the game so no one else can play. At that point he's going to get thrown out and get slapped with trespassing if he doesn't leave. If he somehow manages to continue messing things up even without being on the property, eventually someone is going to get sick of his crap and they're going to figure out what sort of charges they can press. Throwing tantrums is not an excuse to be able to do whatever you want on the internet.

The article is really sparse on details, so I'm having to guess a fair bit here. I can't imagine that a single computer generated enough traffic for the attack, nor do I believe his attack was surgical enough to only affect the WoW server and nothing else. What I would expect is that his attack relied on hundreds if not thousands of computers that either he hacked or purchased as time on a botnet and the secondary effects of his attack disrupted a fair amount of the internet backbone in that area. If my speculation pans out, he honestly got off pretty easy for the amount of potential damage and downtime he caused.

The article is really sparse on details, so I'm having to guess a fair bit here. I can't imagine that a single computer generated enough traffic for the attack, nor do I believe his attack was surgical enough to only affect the WoW server and nothing else. What I would expect is that his attack relied on hundreds if not thousands of computers that either he hacked or purchased as time on a botnet and the secondary effects of his attack disrupted a fair amount of the internet backbone in that area. If my speculation pans out, he honestly got off pretty easy for the amount of potential damage and downtime he caused.

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No need to speculate, let me see if I can break it down for you. The article said it was a DDOS attack and even explained what that means. It also said it was targeted specifically at WOW servers. It even mentioned that Blizzard Entertainment was based in Irvine, CA (an american company) which is how the FBI got involved.
/bow

No need to speculate, let me see if I can break it down for you. The article said it was a DDOS attack and even explained what that means. It also said it was targeted specifically at WOW servers. It even mentioned that Blizzard Entertainment was based in Irvine, CA (an american company) which is how the FBI got involved.
/bow

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Uh, okay. . . you're still missing pretty much all of the details though. There's no mention of the computers used in the attack, whether he hacked them himself via malware or purchased time on a botnet, both things being very illegal in their own right. There's also no details of the secondary damage done, Blizzard co-locates their servers and there is no mention of damages caused to other companies and servers that are also located in the affected data centers. DDoSing anything is along the lines of dropping a nuke, there's an insane amount of collateral damage as the datacenter's infrastructure is affected as well as possibly even backbone switches and routes leading to that datacenter.

All in all, 1 year in prison and reimbursing Blizzard labor costs seems really generous given just how much damage was possibly caused by this kids actions. Too generous for my tastes.

There were times that a login problem was actually caused by botnet DDOS attacks. It's stupid but there you have it.

And to the person wondering if the attack involved multiple systems. If it is a DDOS then most assuredly yes. If it is simply a DOS attack, well that's harder to say. Most times to be effective today it needs to be an actualy DDOS attack. We are past the days when bad net code in Doom would stress test a network.

that's nothing...i remember when WoD came out....8+ HOUR queue times. and this went on for 3+ weeks. it got to the point where i set up my toon in my barracks so no one else could be around me to see, then rigged up a mechanical process to have my toon jump about every 10 - 15 seconds to avoid the auto-logout. it was the only way i could ever get in the game to play after work for more than a month.

I mostly miss the loot lag of vanilla. Stuck in the crouch position, zooming along, and 2 minutes later the popup would appear, but then notice you were 23 miles from the corpse and disappear.

Good old days!

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Forgot all about how horrid that was how. That was on par with vanilla UO's lag, but I mean that was far more forgivable they were running the servers on basically a pair of hamsters one for networking and one for processing and that's why they got tired and servers shut down every night.